I find SQL much more awkward than proper language-idiomatic APIs. Yes, SQL shines when you can whip up a big multi-table join, with nice group by-s and wheres,

I find SQL much more awkward than proper language-idiomatic APIs. Yes, SQL shines when you can whip up a big multi-table join, with nice group by-s and wheres, havings and whatnots, but that's rare. Though, arguably, ORMs solved most of the crazy string concatenation query crafting craziness.